Semicolonized Mind

1.Green monkeys have the tiniest hands.The mother grasps the hanging mango with leathery newborn fingers, wrapping her toddler-sized mouth around the skin. An infant straddles her chest, watching you like a dashboard bobblehead, its lazy stare bouncing with her movements. A voice yells for you to stop, control yourself. You roll the feeling between your thumb and index finger as you peel back the palm fronds and stare into bared, sun-stained fangs. There is no point in self-control now.“Bite me,” you whisper. “Bite me.”She lunges sideways, her infant's shrill alarm rising to the top of the mango tree. You watch her throw herself upward, a green shimmer ricocheting from branch to branch. From a safe vantage point, she sits back onto her haunches. The infant unlatches; beneath its unsure grip the thick branch is a tightrope. Topher touches your shoulder, but you shrug out of his grip.“Mount Hillaby is not a real mountain,” you say, turning back to the winding trail. The dirt path is rubbed raw by foot traffic. You can see splashes of red clay beneath the soil.Topher doesn't reply. You wonder if he has already grown tired of the person you are becoming. He has stopped to take a photograph—his back bent to an angle, his feet rooted and spread.His skin is lobster red despite the splotches of un-rubbed-in sunblock on his cheeks and arms; a neon-orange shirt barely spreads over his thick frame. Everything about him is a rugby player.You turn back to the trail. The dank-earth smell gives way to the sea; you can hear it if you close your eyes. Until the monkey's fangs, you were doing well.“Hey, can you see the top yet?” Topher yells, his face obscured by a digital camera.“No, the path disappears after this incline. Sure it's still there?”“Yeah. Look, you went too far. There's a drop. Almost thirty, forty feet.”You look down. The tips of breadfruit trees, the tangle of vines clawing sideways from Neem to Neem, from Poinsettia to jutting Mahogany. A sea of green betraying the absolute ground beneath it.“Josh, the path is down here.”You turn slowly. He smiles at you encouragingly.2.At the top of the mountain that is not a mountain there is a pagoda. Topher reaches it first, swinging his feet over the low stone wall, tossing his bag into the corner. You approach slowly, rubbing your hand along the faded Lion of Judah painted into the outside edifice. The wall is whitewashed, but in places you can see the green, gold, red, black. You can still see the holy faces of dreadlocked prophets. Topher angles his body to capture you in this place. Click. You feel suddenly ill. Click.“Do you think this is some kind of shrine?” Topher asks, his American twang coming out.“It's Rastafari.”“Like Bob Marley?”“Yes and no.”“It's either one or the other,” he chuckles.You think of the time you heard “Redemption Song” in a campus café. The speakers were crap, the sound full of tinsel and static. The golden-haired boy in front of you in the line nodded, said, “This is my song.” You didn't hum it—he hummed it. You didn't sing it—he sang it. The song made everyone else uncomfortable—even you, a brown-skinned island boy, because you couldn't locate your own agony within it.You sigh, say Yes, and suffer through Topher singing “No Woman No Cry.” His put-on accent, his force-dropped g's. His camera clicking away.After awhile he grows pensive and puts his arm around your shoulder. “You know, later I'll show you these photographs and you'll realize that you were happy.”3.It is nearly sunset. There is a road that winds the not-mountain; you will take the easy way home. Topher leans against the pagoda wall, his stare out into the valley below. He has tried over the course of the afternoon. He has done that thing people do where they relay stories of their own suffering: I have been there, I have seen what you've seen. Before rushing back to Barbados for the funeral, he had broken up with his long-term boyfriend. You listen to him, his voice as meditative and small as you'd ever hear it (you can cup it in your hands).“I would never have brought him here,” he laughs softly. You know he is remembering one of two events: Justin in full Julie Andrews drag for Halloween or Justin being jumped by a group of older men later that night on the last metro.He trails off. “He was too much.”“It's okay to miss him,” you say, mechanically. You are staring into your lap, at the Plantation Reserve Sugar tin. At the three and a half pounds of ashes folded within.“She didn't want to be cremated,” Topher tells you, following your gaze. Your skin prickles. Those are not his words to say out loud.“This was the only way I could salvage any of her.”“Yes, but you can bury the ashes,” he says. “Put them in a nice mahogany box. I'll pay for it.”You tune him out, unable to comprehend how a human being can burn so long, so bright, so small. But Topher's voice filters in, fugue-like, responding to its own echo:“It's been three years since you left Montreal ...”“I came as soon as you called ...”“I know how you felt about her ...”“Why did you call me if you won't talk to me ...”“I'm trying to help you ...”“I'm trying ...”4.You loved stray dogs because you saw yourself in them. Lady had no hair when she crawled onto your porch that night. Your Tita squatted down, rattling off some Arabic benediction. She took a wet rag and bathed the dog's body, pouring out a litany of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, Old World curses and New World regrets. They blended together over the dog's parchment skin. Both woman and mutt shivered. You stood in the doorway telling your grandmother to call a vet. She sighed and pulled her white hair back into a bun.“No Abeed,” she warned you. No black ones.On the phone you heard the tiredness in the vet's voice. He refused to come to that woman's house again. You were nine. You pleaded as best you could but he was hard against your fear. He reminded you of unpaid bills. Words said. Words that were overlarge in your small hands. Hands that could barely pick apart the venom in his voice. He hung up.Your Tita knelt, watching as the hairless dog let slip new life onto her porch. “Insha'Allah!” she praised, her eyes full of tears. You lunged forward and hugged her from behind, her bony hands clenching your shoulders. The hairless rat wriggled toward the sound of her tears.5.You and Topher became friends out of fear. You had never traveled out of the island; he had never said he was gay to more than a handful of strangers at a rest stop in Missouri. You both studied engineering: he on his family's money, you on an island scholarship. He didn't need to know your past, your skin, your nose, your accent, your religion. You didn't really understand sexuality enough to question his claims.In your final year you stayed behind to spend Christmas with him and his parents. They had no statues of the Virgin, no looming plastic portraits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Their walls were not cluttered with photographs in rusting frames. You looked: under the bed of the guest room, behind the pulled shower curtain, even in the nook between bookcases and writing desks—they had no dogs.Topher's bedroom had a smaller Pride flag than his dorm room. He took it down, folded it in quarters and pressed it into your hand.“Something to remember Montreal—and me.”Your hands were small in his hands. He closed his thumbs around you.6.Lady howled in your arms while your Tita carried the last stiffened pup away into a field behind the house. You didn't have to witness it to see the hand-forked earth, the rat-dogs buried by the banana compost. Lady whimpered into your armpit, trying to nuzzle through you. When you finally released her, she bolted toward the cardboard box filled with old church skirts where she had given birth, turning in circles, confused by the phantom scent of loss.In loss, she became your only friend. You would climb out of your bedroom window at night and lie beside her, whispering things that she would never contest. Even at nine you had become acutely aware of borders: the ones that cropped up around an island and kept you landlocked, the ones that locked you out of family conversations (a deathly quiet when you entered a room), the ones that built themselves between classmates whose mothers warned against you. Lady would lick your face furiously, attracted by the salt of your tears.Your grandmother would never build a doghouse, so most mornings the postman's laughter woke you, curled in the wet ground beside the skeletal dog. In those first moments of wakefulness you would be unable to process the words that climbed out of your consciousness—the words that people used to describe your mother, the words that trickled down to define you. One word persisted: abomination.7.Topher has curled into sleep. You asked him to abandon the pagoda, to see in it someplace someone once loved and had to abandon out of necessity.In a warped way the depression is not all her fault. You have been sitting with your Tita in your hands like a weight. When she was alive and you crisscrossed Saint Laurent and René Lévesque, she spoke to you. Her voice inside of your voice, her actions inside of your actions. Yet out of the four years you spent in Montreal, she called to speak to you only three times. Each time it was to ask, Are you eating? Are you going to church? Then a pause. A tensing. Are you doing what she did?You try to decide the best of all possible outcomes: to bury her or to release her to the land where she spent all of her allotted amount of life. The tin doesn't answer back.You hear rustling. The green monkey climbs out of the bush and up onto the walls of the empty pagoda. She walks awkwardly, one-handedly, cradling the spindly body of her infant. In the sunset everything is fire; you can see the bruises on the right side, even from this distance. They are eggplant purple. Royalty or funeral.She is not mournful like Lady had been. She doesn't circle her little Icarus, disbelieving. She is regal in his death. She lays him down in the middle of the pagoda. Others climb out of the bushes, their tiny hands holding on to the world the best they can. They scrabble up the whitewashed walls, their claws chipping away until the lion resurfaces.You open the small tin, a few specks race away into the Scotland District, down into Bathsheba, across towards Morgan Lewis Windmill.8.No lights worked in your Tita's guest bedroom. The windows were sealed shut. The air-conditioner unit breathed mold. Veins of green slime, varicose, heavy, spread into the corners and crevices. The room housed lives: boxes, piles of batteries, twenty-seven packages of Slam! (the dishwashing liquid popularized in the 1970s by a Soca song), a one-eyed porcelain doll, passports, ID cards, forms, bank notices, invoices, school notebooks (from schools that no longer existed), telephone bills, telephone cords, telephone.Sometimes you opened the boxes, laying everything out as if to break down your mother's life. Photos. Clippings of hair. Booties from when she was a baby. Drawings from school. You were never anywhere among her things. Your grandmother kept only the things that predated you.You came home one day to find the yard filled with boxes, papers, telephone bills, telephone cords, telephone.Your Tita pulled you away from windows. You were smaller then—small in the eye of her anger. You thrashed, but her fingers on your shoulders pinched the soft bell of flesh like you were a stray dog on her porch. A downpour destroyed everything. You cried, but she cried loudest.9.In Topher's small apartment in Montreal you tried marijuana. He pressed his lips against yours, the racing smoke drove you wild. You let him stroke you. You became friends when he relinquished your flaccid penis. When the smoke flushed itself, he calmed you—questioning is fine. What questions were you asking, what answers could he give?That night you spoke out all the bottled words. The dark guest room. The mountain of things. The photos of a woman you didn't recognize. The family who checked you, held you to the light, tried to find out who you were. The grandmother who steadied the truth with a firm hand. Topher listened, tripping in and speaking over you.He curled away, propping his head up. In his own trance you caught phrases, the fear of being outside, hunted, the desperate longing to be renewed, brought to life every day by some grounding reason. A reason that was sure enough to validate and press against the secret, unspeakable fear that being gay rendered him worthless.You couldn't stop, the bottle was uncorked. It spilled. The touch of your Tita's hand, the bruising, the look in her eyes. The jab of her toenails into the side of a sickly cane dog. Her sobbing, curled form around a dying village cat. The hours spent on the back step praying. The hungry nights. The way your hand fell. The way your toenails jab into the side of the sickly cane dog. The sobbing, curled form you make around a dying village cat.The way you learned to be cruel, good, hateful, hopeful, all by yourself.“It couldn't have been all bad?” Topher whispered.You look through him to the dark ceiling. “They would say my mother was an abomination.”“For being queer?”“They don't use that word. I keep telling you nobody outside of Montreal is using that word; they don't even say the word lesbian. If they say it, it carries weight. It's real.”“I've been called worse.”“Anyway, I don't know what she was ... who she was. Nobody will tell me.” You tried to explain to him the way loneliness became normalized, until the feeling of being with someone was so arcane that it couldn't make sense. A television set with the sound muted. The blurred image of the coast through the back window of the Oistins bus.“You should talk to somebody about it?” It's a statement-question, a kind of bridge that could connect what you were saying to what he inevitably wanted to share.“I just felt alone all the time.”“Did you hate her?”Nobody had ever asked you that question. You took a moment, processed it, answered positively.In the morning it didn't make sense. In the morning you were not fulfilled.10.You had to spend Thanksgiving weekend at your great-aunt's house in Kitchener. Her staircase was lined with stuffed cats. She forgot that they were soulless and put out milk for them. In the morning the bowls were always empty.When you got into her green SUV, outside the train station, she grabbed your cheeks and twisted your face so that she could see the earring stud under your lip. She muttered to herself. She smelled like cat urine, her hair wild and disheveled. At red lights people peered in, close enough to fog the glass. You didn't know Canadians to be so invasive.You asked her about your mother over dinner. She sucked the marrow out of the snapped chicken leg, slurping noisily.“She was a good girl,” she managed after a while.You scanned the walls. Picture frames blotted out the whitewash, like at your Tita's house, except these frames were empty or filled with stock photographs. White children and black children and everybody else's smiling children.“What was she like, as a woman?”Your great-aunt stopped chewing, her was like She left when she was Tita let all of the dogs and through every room in the house. They were into with locked porcelain They were into and and They never or made too and they out of her way like of They were not loved She saw in them what she saw in someone in great-aunt didn't She stayed in her room watching of When she to a she howled Arabic words. Your Tita called but they didn't talk They into your down to the her on you sucked her for you could have everything in Your was to in three You she her hand you like never the house, Your came out, by her as as Montreal, but what can you She a in her palm and the You had come with a She your Her eyes were hard and they were filled with a the and her mother make the best She to you, her mouth You suddenly didn't know what to ask, questions were the most ones would help you else use but she use black She stood up some When I it's always too no how little I She sighed her face by a and she let out a too her hands. had her and her fingers the She at it you than to help some things are hard to talk She stood there she reminded you of your never about you the first was turning to a Her was with old television of by a that was bent into itself, of You were the them. The house felt and empty at the her hand and they You and they You have children and they Her words carried the of a who her couldn't but her eyes were with tears. She the on her was my mother you she You want you look You could see her in the see her one foot toward the as if it right You enough to understand that the in your voice didn't call it out of it was the winding of her own that it was a what she always don't about me he I about boy, you don't even know that in the to you, you with a kind of It said I did the best I could with what I had and was I to and There are things you will never seen that look on the faces of everyone you even in Montreal, people who didn't know your skin, your nose, your accent, your up the she was to her You kept the at the awhile you heard her along to of her voice as if she were to the was of a You were trying to climb the of the green monkeys on the You couldn't turn you could only climb toward them. Their until they were all that you could and their You woke in your own She was down at you. It was too dark to see her She your you you off in the dark and put you back to you I saw white Tita would say that that that someone will soon be remember her voice that is a didn't understand the of the the fear of being Even at four you that things could that things could be remember trying to again. The of the is The smell of and The of on your The sound of two in the room, You remember the I they that night because there are so few in your The like a and point of after it. It was dark in the don't remember her full behind The is The of Topher's is The monkey infant is a The inside of the pagoda of like it is folded into the The mother in a her caught in the She her when you come too You step as if she has a back up Topher has out the small tin filled with it to her, it down beside her infant. She and is a into the doing this to her I saw the His voice is small. You think about his voice has always been small. wanted to be fingers over the of the tin. Topher trying to the between you those from you to was just all she ever really a cruel, voice is to forward and press his body against until you feel You don't have to see it to know it to be that your is the tin. In its you see your mother, rising out of the in the path of a the through A this out of your when you were and said, this there are Her for years as the on in your turn to look at Topher because always been his on his His eyes are his lips pressed in You know what he to say and you know the answers to all the he and you say You will let this you. You will let him the way down the you two men you think to be Topher a with them. They you the of eyes stare into the two of one set of You don't press the they they out their You and at the with your them. You should have Even who is not from this laughs at you. The you a sure you from at your down the the open out like a The night is and full of Topher to his camera at it, but you both know that it won't will just be a of white voice is “You up in up in a room away from dark his face into you have to it for a few moments to see the of the I have been there, I have seen what you have seen. you that he up a and the of the camera is pressed up against your It is you, a few hours at the foot of You out of it could have been any life but this life. The is in that your lips are up into a I was You did look you that one for are by the way you two can back into old but saying your in the The green monkey has been following you, tiny in the You know her by her eyes. She to be for you the camera face up to her, but she is a and you are a with a the the that is both and at the it it will be like of this you say At this she her fangs. up onto her tiny hands spread It is she spreads herself as if to say, You will be on this mountain that is not a in the moment, the white camera face is you are back into and there is He to take the camera away, but you want to take a of the make her to make it so that could be the the last in your mother's would be and do not your They pick you you across the like a in that line you know everything there is to know about she in the that she was a that she to the that you to that you both folded around someone who used the word are left in the world that a that has opened up. You the until the of yourself has no until it is just a on a not with and and the the but the monkey is already

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